Tomorrow, Sunday 8th October 2023, marks a year since cancer claimed my Soulmate.. I never knew losing a spouse could be that dreadful. For years, somebody would be sharing in your life, being a part of it, partnering with you in all things. For years, both of you would grow into living life as one, and then suddenly one of the pair is left alone.

For me, the sad night of Saturday the 8th of October, last year about 9 PM when my wife, Barr Marian (May) Ngozi Eluemunor breathed her last, changed everything.

Reverend Father Vincent May Ogunsoro and I wheeled her into the mortuary. That night, I couldn’t forgive myself for my “wickedness”; the wickedness that not only made me to accept that she had died, but that I could actually take her body to the mortuary section of the Garki Hospital, Abuja, after I had viewed the remains of other human beings lying there, in that cold, cold, life-forsaken place. I have not been able to come to terms with how I was able to leave her there; though there was that cold comfort that she had escaped from every pain- and she suffered pains, through two surgeries in two months, through over seven hospital stays in one year as cancer ravaged her body and the smile began little by little to flee from her face. It was like she was besieged and nothing could help as the sickness

consumed her slowly but steadily. All she clung to was her God and her rosary. The internment was the real closure.

Enough, I did not set out to recall the ordeal she faced. I want to say that the past one year has been for me that of a lonely violin. I have hugged silence like never before, retreating from the social scene, even the social media. Even my writing has suffered as my column has appeared in fits and starts. And my book projects stalled.

One day a mournful tune came on from my car music set. Title: A LONELY VIOLIN by Bee Gees. Suddenly, it matched my mood and it hit me that the Bee Gees had even captured my life, the only one I have lived since my wife died for I have all that while heard only the sound of a lonely violin.

Part of the A Lonely Violin music track released in 1970, which reaches to my very soul goes like this: “Oh, What it is to be lonely. One time long ago, I tried so hard to reach you, A song I tried to teach you. But you were (not) there. Now let it all begin, I wanna hear it, now, let it all begin, Bring me the sound of a lonely violin.

There is the sound of a lonely violin. Not even now, there’s nothing I’d be taking, What world am I forsaking, When you (are not) there, Now let it all begin, I wanna hear it, now, let it all begin, Bring me the sound of a lonely violin”.

I know that there are many women and women listening to this sound. Everything changed when their loved ones died. It is not for nothing that Roy C. Hammond (of the Sex and Soul album) sang in Fireside, a track in the 1975 album, Something Nice: “Like the sun when darkness comes, it disappears, Like the Earth when earthquake comes, we become weak, like life when death comes we are so sad, take me by your fireside, I need to be warm”.

There are some people out there that death has taken every warmth from their lives.  My heart goes out to them. Death is awful. Were it not for the existence of God, this life would actually be as meaningless as Shakespeare put it in Macbeth Act 5, Scene 5: “Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frest his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; Signifying nothing.”

But there is God and the soul and Heaven! And after the sound of a lonely violin come the rhapsodies of heavenly music. Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted…says the Christ. But for now, there is for me, the sound of a lonely violin.